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Fortitude, tradition help Finns flourish in U.P.

John Carlisle
11:14 p.m. EDT August 25, 2014

Mark and Riikka Hepokoski share a porch swing as their daughter Greta walks along the railing. The couple is teaching their kids Finnish folk dancing, the Finnish language and little ways of the culture.(Photo: Ryan Garza, Ryan Garza)

KEWEENAW PENINSULA – John Niska ran naked through the forest and jumped into Lake Superior.

It was cool summer day, and he'd just gotten out of his backyard sauna, which sits at the edge of the fern-dappled woods around his cabin.

Niska had the sauna built here recently, partly because he grew up with one and missed it, partly because up here, a sauna is simply an essential part of life.

"My grandparents lived a mile from our farm, and they had one," said the 66-year-old college professor. "It was traditional on Saturday night. We went to their sauna, and in the winter I would roll in the snow with my friends after the sauna. It's second nature. I think it's the Finnish in me."

There are few things more Finnish than a sauna, and there are few places as Finnish as the Keweenaw Peninsula.

More people of Finnish descent live in the northwest part of the Upper Peninsula than anywhere else in the world outside of Finland, according to U.S. census numbers. And their heritage isn't just some faded memory. It's a living presence that infuses the culture.

"There's still an identity, and sometimes it takes visitors to come in to recognize that identity, but it's in some of the foodways, and it's certainly in people's attitudes," said James Kurtti, the 56-year-old director of the Finnish American Heritage Center in Hancock, which is part of Finlandia University. "There's a strong sense of being Finnish."

The blue and white Finnish flag is painted on mailboxes, flutters from flag posts on streetlights and flies in front of houses. The Finnish language is taught in high school. The downtown street signs of Hancock have both English and Finnish names for the roads.

And there's the geography itself — the firs and pines, the lakes and streams, and the harsh winters that aren't much different from the weather and the landscape of Finland itself.

James Kurtti, editor of the Finnish American Reporter and director of the Finnish American Heritage Center, describes a savusauna (smoke sauna) at the Hanka Homestead Museum in Askel.(Photo: Ryan Garza, Ryan Garza)

A lot of places in America say they're like another country. Up here, it really is.

"I think that it's not only within the people who have Finnish roots, but it kind of reflects on the entire area," said Kurtti, who's also the editor of the Finnish American Reporter, a national monthly newspaper based in Hancock that reports on all things Finn.

"People have a little bit of Finnish in them regardless of where their ancestors came from if you live here."

Copper miners

Finns first arrived in the Upper Peninsula after the Civil War, when a copper mining company recruited them from mines in Norway because of their reputation as hard workers. First, they came by the dozen, then by the thousands as word spread back home about the money to be made in the newly discovered mines of the U.P.

In 1880, about 1,500 Finns lived in Keweenaw and Houghton counties. By 1930 there were nearly 75,000 Finns and their descendants here, founding small towns with Finnish names like Nisula and Tapiola and Paavola.

The region became the world's biggest producer of copper, and generated more mineral wealth than the California Gold Rush. To this day, the area's still called Copper Country.

But one by one, the mines were depleted, the money left the region, and once-thriving cities became empty, leaving a string of ghost towns along what's now the main highway north through the Keweenaw Peninsula.

"This place never really recovered from the mining days," Kurtti said. "It's a quarter of the population in some of these communities from what it was 100 years ago. There's just no wealth here. The industries are all small. But people have lived with it for so long they're just kind of accustomed to it. I think when a recession comes you don't feel it as much, because it's always hard times."

There's a word that's everywhere here. It's on T-shirts and mugs, on bumper stickers and license plates, and it's part of everyday conversation. It's "sisu" and it has become shorthand for the essence of being Finnish in the Upper Peninsula. It roughly translates as fortitude.

It's always taken a lot of it to survive up here. The weather is brutal. Just last winter, 380 inches of snow fell. There aren't a lot of jobs, and many of those are only seasonal. And residents have long said they don't even feel connected to the rest of Michigan. "We're closer to two other state capitals than we are our own," Kurtti said.

"If you live here you have to have a lot of sisu," said Melvin Kangas, 81, who, like most Finns here, is a descendant of immigrant miners. He sat inside Roy's Pasties and Bakery in Houghton, holding a conversation in Finnish with friends over morning coffee as the Portage River flowed past the window.

"It takes fortitude to live up here. Some people, they move up here, they don't realize what it's like," Kangas said. "In a few years, you see a 'For Sale' sign on their place."

Mark Hepokoski of Hancock shares snap peas from his garden with his wife, Riikka Hepokoski, as their children Greta, 10, and Johan, 13, pick more. “We moved here and kind of fell in love with the area,” Mark says.(Photo: Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press)

Pasties and saunas

Mark Hepokoski and his family of snow-haired blonds live in a fairy-tale house in a forest where people pick berries by the roadside.

"We were lucky to get it," said the 39-year-old father of four about his small, yellow, country-style house that stands among little red barns. "We moved here and kind of fell in love with the area. We'd always heard there's this place called the U.P., this land of pasties and Finns."

He grew up in Minnesota to Finnish-American parents, worked on the East Coast, lived in Finland for a time, met Riikka, and together they moved to the northern Upper Peninsula, to a place not much different from the country she came from.

"In a way, the people here are more Finnish than the people in Finland, like they're really proud of their heritage and stuff, proud to be Finnish," said Riikka, a 36-year-old native of Finland, as she served the family a dinner of chicken, potatoes and greens picked from the yard, a Finnish sourdough rye bread and grape juice.

"These people here are like really old-fashioned Finland," she said.

The couple teaches their kids Finnish folk dancing, the Finnish language and little ways of the culture, like pulling the car over in the country and picking berries and mushrooms in the woods. It's a Finnish thing, they said.

"Everybody picks berries here," Mark said. The family did it when they lived in Virginia for a time, and would draw stares. "My friends thought it was so strange. They would call us hunters and gatherers because they'd never seen that on the side of the highway. So then when we moved here we noticed everybody picks berries. Up here, it's just a normal part of the culture."

Few things symbolize that culture like the sauna. Like most Upper Peninsula Finnish families, they have a wood-burning sauna behind the house and use it often.

"It's something hard to explain," Mark said. "You know, they talk about how saunas are a big deal, but you don't understand it until you experience it. It's like we can't live without sauna."

“The sauna is a very important part of the Finnish culture and tradition,” says John Niska of Ontonagan. “The majority of the Finnish homes that were built had a sauna in the yard somewhere.”(Photo: Ryan Garza, Ryan Garza)

Speaking Finnish

Now and then, the conversation inside Roy's Pasties and Bakery lapses into Finnish.

The version of the language spoken in the Upper Peninsula is an archaic form, frozen in place at the time when the miners immigrated here. It's so old-fashioned it's drawn the curiosity of Finnish natives who visit the area.

"Our language here is different than the Finnish language now in Finland," Kangas said. "So they enjoyed talking to me because I was an antique piece. They would invite me to parties and I wondered why I was so popular. But it was because they wanted to hear their mother tongue in a way that hadn't been used in a while."

Diane Thornton sat with him and two other Finnish friends, listening to them talk as she sipped coffee. The 62-year-old Houghton resident grew up witnessing Finnish Lutheran Sunday services in her house, and remembers her grandmother singing Finnish nursery rhymes to the grandkids. The melodic sound of their conversation reminds her of that childhood.

"Sometimes I'll surprise them and come out with a few words myself," she said. "But I like to hear it."

This little morning gathering with the retirees, she noted, is one of the few places to hear the language conversationally nowadays.

"I think it's going to just disappear," she said. "The torch isn't being carried to the next generation."

Kurtti isn't so sure, though, that the Finnishness of the area is fading. "I don't get too concerned with trying to put the lid on the casket," he said.

He's one of the people making sure it doesn't die. As director of the heritage center, he collects artifacts and archive material, screens Finnish films, offers folk dancing lessons and teaches the Finnish language.

He also fills a more pop cultural role, like helping with proofreading requests for Finnish tattoos, and fielding requests like the one recently from a woman who asked whether he could find someone to come to a birthday party in a Finnish folk costume and sing "Happy Birthday" in Finnish. He made it happen.

They may be funny requests, but they are signs that even if the language itself isn't spoken in public much anymore, the Finnish identity of this region remains strong. People here still hold onto that identity because it helps them define this place and themselves.

"I had a woman come a couple years ago," Kurtti said of a visitor to the Finnish American Heritage Center. "Her grandmother was born in Finland. And she said, 'You know, my grandmother and my father, I always thought they were nuts because they were so unlike everybody else.' Then they went to Finland and said, 'We realized there's a whole country of these people.' "

"So it's kind of like that, I think. You understand yourself if you understand your history."

Columnist John Carlisle writes about interesting people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com